It's even worse

Will Bunch

Posted:
Monday, February 15, 2010, 7:32 PM

There's too many corrupt members of Congress, and too few hours in the day. I was so disgusted earlier today with Evan Bayh's politics I did not even realize that his ethics are even worse. Ironically, this tidbit comes from a piece by an Indiana journalist with the wonderful name of Matt Sledge (the Sledge Report?...heh) that aims to defend Bayh and his family, but makes him look even more pathetic:

For many years Susan's membership on several major corporate boards (eight of them, in 2008) was something of an open secret. Only over the course of the health care reform debate was it widely spoken about in Indiana. With Bayh playing a prominent role in the haggling over the public option and medical device fees, it was impossible to ignore the fact that WellPoint, a behemoth insurer, was paying Susan Bayh hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Between 2006 and 2008 Susan earned $2.1 million from health insurers. Legal under Senate rules, Susan Bayh's refusal to step down from WellPoint's board, and her husband's denial that the millions she had earned from WellPoint would influence him, were greeted with derision from ethics watchdogs.

This is infuriating. I realize that everyone's spouse has a right to earn a living, but at the end of the day if Indiana's junior senator goes on a nice vacation or wants to buy a bigger house, it's being paid for by the insurance companies that he's failing to regulate. And reporting on that isn't "going after his wife," as the author bizarrely implies, but it's going after the questionable ethics of a United States senator. It's also a disgrace that this angle doesn't get more play in the mainstream media.

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